Download PDF The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan
The presented book The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan we provide here is not sort of typical book. You recognize, checking out currently does not imply to deal with the printed book The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan in your hand. You could obtain the soft file of The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan in your gizmo. Well, we indicate that the book that we extend is the soft data of the book The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan The material and all points are very same. The difference is just the kinds of guide The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan, whereas, this problem will specifically pay.
The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan
Download PDF The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan
When you are rushed of task deadline and also have no suggestion to obtain inspiration, The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan book is among your remedies to take. Reserve The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan will certainly provide you the best resource and also point to get motivations. It is not just concerning the works for politic company, administration, economics, and various other. Some bought jobs making some fiction your jobs additionally require motivations to conquer the job. As just what you need, this The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan will possibly be your choice.
Well, book The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan will certainly make you closer to exactly what you want. This The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan will certainly be consistently buddy whenever. You may not forcedly to consistently finish over checking out an e-book in other words time. It will be simply when you have leisure as well as spending couple of time to make you feel satisfaction with just what you read. So, you could get the definition of the notification from each sentence in guide.
Do you recognize why you must read this site and also what the relationship to reading e-book The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan In this contemporary period, there are numerous means to get the publication and also they will be a lot easier to do. One of them is by obtaining the publication The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan by on-line as what we tell in the link download. Guide The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan could be a choice since it is so proper to your requirement now. To obtain guide on-line is very easy by only downloading them. With this chance, you could review guide wherever and whenever you are. When taking a train, awaiting listing, as well as hesitating for someone or various other, you can read this on-line e-book The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan as a great close friend again.
Yeah, checking out an e-book The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan can add your good friends checklists. This is among the formulas for you to be effective. As recognized, success does not imply that you have great things. Recognizing and knowing greater than various other will provide each success. Next to, the message and also perception of this The Secret Of The Incas: Myth, Astronomy, And The War Against Time, By William Sullivan could be taken as well as chosen to act.
Step by step, Sullivan pieces together the hidden esoteric tradition of the Andes to uncover the tragic secret of the Incas, a tribe who believed that, if events in the heavens could influence those on earth, perhaps the reverse could be true. Anyone who reads this book will never look at the ruins of the Incas, or at the night sky, the same way again. Illustrations.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #1222008 in Books
- Published on: 1997-05-20
- Released on: 1997-05-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.00" w x 6.00" l, 1.55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 464 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780517888513
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
From Kirkus Reviews
A sometimes murky, frequently meandering excursion into the meaning of ancient Andean beliefs, arguing that in a series of sophisticated myths Incan soothsayers foretold their own civilization's doom at the hands of Pizarro and his conquistadors in 1532. Sullivan, a scholar of Native American cultures, begins with a question that has perplexed historians of the Spanish conquest: How could the vast Inca Empire, with its millions of subjects, have been conquered overnight by a band of 170 Spanish adventurers? Sullivan digs into the history and mythology of Andean civilization to find what he feels is the answer: For hundreds of years the sages of the Andes had believed that astronomical transitions presaged earthly cataclysms; reading changes in the night skies in the 1400s, Incan priest-astronomers foretold the imminent destruction of their own recently founded empire. Sullivan argues, in a sometimes hyperbolic first-person account (``In that moment I had, I believed, touched for an instant the terrible burden and tragic urgency of the Inca vision''), that the Incas followed the planets, recorded precessional events in their myths, and equated social and celestial changes. He further asserts that elements in Incan culture preceding Pizarro's arrival--constant warfare and the Incan ritual of human sacrifice--represented an attempt to halt the march of time and prevent the apocalyptic events foreshadowed by changes in the night sky. The Incas assumed that the arrival of Pizarro represented the culmination of the prophecy and the failure of their own efforts to prevent its occurrence. The thread of the author's argument can be hard to follow. Still, Sullivan's deep feeling for Andean folk materials, and the originality of his observations about Andean astronomy, make his text worthwhile for those interested in the history of South American civilization and for those who, in the wake of Joseph Campbell's works, seek enduring meaning in ancient mythology. (History Book Club and One Spirit Book Club alternate selections) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From the Inside Flap
Step by step, Sullivan pieces together the hidden esoteric tradition of the Andes to uncover the tragic secret of the Incas, a tribe who believed that, if events in the heavens could influence those on earth, perhaps the reverse could be true. Anyone who reads this book will never look at the ruins of the Incas, or at the night sky, the same way again. Illustrations.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Hamlet's Mill - a beautiful demonstration
By Hexagram of the Heavens
Sullivan's book, "The Secret of the Incas" is powerful, surprising, almost impeccable, and emotionally moving. The unexpected conclusions are, for all that they are unexpected, logical extensions of what I call the "Hamlet's Mill Thread" - the proposition that myth can be read as history, given certain rules for its decoding. Sullivan in effect provides the first comprehensive demonstration - I myself would say "proof" - that those rules, proposed by Santillana and Von Dechend, authors of "Hamlet's Mill", can be applied to specific bodies of cultural myth such as that of the Andes.
The authors who explore this thread, which leads sometimes to imaginative stretches, have to tread a fine line to remain within the pale of academic respectability (and of course many of the most successful don't, not having academic posts to defend.) Sullivan does this by resolutely staying with the bounds of what he himself terms the "rules of engagement" for academia, but he also has well-written and thoughtful critiques of the milieu in which he operates, including a welcome discussion of the reasons for the general rejection by archeologists and anthropologists of diffusionist theories - which are of course the only reasonable explanation for the wide-spread cultural similarities between the archaic pyramid cultures world-wide. He also discusses the reality of older matrilineal societies in the Andes, a nice reality check on the "age of matriarchy" idea whose adherents carry on one of the cartoon discussion of our time.
Sullivan's conclusions are surprising because (1) he shows that the Incas did not have a complete grasp of Precession as a cycle, but were aware only of the oscillating movement of the changes in declination of the stars (as shown in a different context by the graphic image of the gods and demons yanking the cosmic serpent at Angkor Wat). The late Inca emperors were engaged in a tragic and doomed endeavor to reverse
precession through sacrifice and prayer, to return to the Golden Age of Viracocha, at the time the Spaniards arrived. This, Sullivan shows, runs parallel to a similar effort by the late pre-conquest Aztecs, which also leads to a discussion of the question of possible contact between these two cultures, an idea not generally accepted in academia.
(2) Also surprising is that the time scale is not deeper than it is, as I had naively hoped. Sullivan pegs the Age of Viracocha at 200 BC to 650 AD. His argument is convincing. I speculate that he simply declines to mention any thoughts he might have had on previous eras, because he must stick, obviously, to what his data will support within the context of his "rules of engagement".
Sullivan's demonstration that mythic events can be given hard dates by planetary conjunctions means that this Andean history and other ethnic / mythic histories yet to be interpreted can now also be correlated with tree ring and ice core data. In this connection, I note that Sullivan mentions at least twice an Andean tradition that the older hunter-gatherer tradition was destroyed by a "rain of fire". Such events have been identified and roughly dated by Robert Schoch as asteroid / comet strikes and solar plasma ejection events, though Sullivan was unaware of this when he published in 1996.
All but the last chapter is the material of Sullivan's dissertation. In the final chapter as published here, he lets his hair down a little bit and indulges in some new age speculation which is generally not unreasonable, compared with others in the field.
However, getting out of his area of expertise, he steps on one noticeable whoopee cushion when, on page 338, he trots out - without a footnote, in contrast to almost every other detail in the book - a false and anachronistic etymology of the musical scale syllables "DO RE MI" etc., claiming it as "medieval" and "already ancient in Dante's time", and makes some comparisons to the Andean pentatonic scale. The (false)
etymology uses the syllables DO and SI which are not earlier than the 17th century, and the purported derivations actually come, if I am not greatly mistaken, from either Madame Blavatsky or one of her disciples Olcott or Ledbetter, and are spurious. The six original syllables UT RE MI FA SOL LA were taken in the 11th century from the initial syllables of six lines of a medieval Latin hymn, and despite a structural similarity to the Hindu and Arabic sets, this is the only authentic etymology. Meanwhile, Sullivan misses the much more significant fact that the Andean pentatonic scale is nearly identical to the Chinese pentatonic scale, which should be food for thought, as the Chinese system has its own diffusional relationship to the musical systems of India, Babylonia, and Greece. Non-musicians who want to speculate in this area should probably read and understand the work of Ernest G. McClain before committing naive mistakes. But considering the strengths of the main part of the book, this is a minor point.
36 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
The Secret of the Incas : Myth, Astronomy, and the War Again
By A Customer
William Sullivan decodes the myths of the Incas.
Secrets of the Incas chronicles how Dr Sullivan first learned to decode ancient Andean myths. These myths - which were recorded by the Spanish at the time of their conquest of the Incas - are, according to Dr Sullivan, a 'message in a bottle' from the Incas to future generations. Dr Sullivan describes how he decoded the myths and how this led him to certain important dates in Andean prehistory and history. A glossary defines and explains various Andean mythological and historical terms, and a timeline shows what Dr Sullivan believes to be the correspondence between mythological, astronomical and archaeological events in the high Andes - how, in effect, what was happening in the heavens was mirrored by what was happening on Earth
On the evening of 15 November 1532, a band of 175 hardened Spanish adventurers crossed a pass in the high Andes. Looking down upon a broad, fertile valley in northern Peru, they became the first Europeans to make contact with the Incas, whose highly developed empire stretched 3,000 miles from Chile to Colombia and had a population of six million. On the following day, in what ranks as one of the strangest events in all recorded history, the Spaniards managed to seize the Inca king Atahuallpa and, in the ensuing panic, used the advantage of their 120 warhorses to kill and wound 10,000 Inca warriors. From that day onward, through luck and guile, and with reinforcements soon pouring in from Panama, the Spaniards - who came in search of gold and glory, in the name of the Roman Catholic Church - never relinquished the edge they seized in that first fateful encounter.
What the Spaniards never knew, and what history does not record, was the reason for the apparently inexplicable collapse of the greatest land empire on the face of the Earth.
Secrets of the Incas explores the baffling and tragic vulnerability of the Inca empire and comes to a startling conclusion: the Spanish had appeared at precisely the right place and at just the right time to fulfil an ancient, astronomically based prophecy of doom.
This conclusion is the result of two decades of research by American scholar Dr William Sullivan into the sophisticated astronomical knowledge of the Incas and how they encrypted this in their myths. Secrets of the Incas presents completely new evidence taken from an Inca myth. In this, Dr William Sullivan believes, lies the key to the basis of the old man's prophecy and, indeed, to the formation of the Inca empire itself. This myth is nothing less than a dire warning of an impending precessional event that, to the Incas, predicted future ruin.
The 'gate' or 'bridge' to the land of the ancestors - that is, the rising of the December solstice Sun with the Milky Way - was about to be washed away. Drawing on their ancient mythological database, the Incas reasoned - from the principle 'as above, so below' - that loss of contact with the ancestors, upon which their religious beliefs were founded, would mean their way of life would be destroyed on Earth.
It was this prophecy that stirred the first Inca emperor to action: if time was merciless, it had to be stopped. So the entire Inca empire, which was less than a century old when the Spanish arrived, became involved in an attempt at cosmic regulation - to change the course of the stars by changing the course of human history on Earth: 'as below, so above.'
William Sullivan decodes the myths of the Incas to reveal an astoundingly precise record of astronomical events. The Incas accepted their fate as written in the stars.
15 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
A rambling, biased, tome
By MysticJaguar
The book examines Inka and Mayan myths using a variety of tools, and many, many words. To the first myth the book applies the theories in Hamlets Mill to explain why the Foxes tail is black and pinpoint AD 650 as the rise of warfare in the Andes. From here it's mostly downhill.
The book then drags us through his own internal mental processes of doubt and disbelief as we look at other myths. Through this long process we are subjected to forceful and unnecessary biases such as there is no proof that a matriarchal society ever existed anywhere in the world. Period. He returns to the subject of matriarchal disbelief many times calling it a big 'red flag'. We are lead through the authors admitted internal stubborness of this and many other issues.
Although I believe the book is correct in it's assocation with the Fox's tail being black being a celestial event ala Hamlets Mills, we spend so many words looking at other myths from a plethora of angles that we are forced into a single conclusion. That no one outside of a culture has any clue at what a given myth really means. The entire book is like running naked through the forest yelling out conclusions about myths which rightly are interpreted only by their creators.
At one point in the discussion of 'finding father' we hear a claim that the Andean man lacked a true heart with the ability to love while he was primarily a hunter within a matrilinear horticultural society. Andean man only gained his heart and full ability to love when the culture changed to fully agriculture and he had to stay at home with the wife and kids. Give me a break. To any Andean person alive this is rubbish. What kinds of conclusions and judgements can we make living outside the cultural box. It is this kind of subtle talk that is a jaguars hair short of prejudice and racism.
Ultimately, although if you like reading from the 'academic' view, this book does lead you through enough alleys to make you feel like the author knows what he is talking about, ultimately it fails from it's biases and from being rooted in a combination of sexism and western scientific dogma.
If the book you to really understand the Andean mind then the author would have had to undergo a process of breaking open his head and surrendering to the mystery of myth rather than trying to break open the myths using the rational mind. Myth is mythic. A view which ultimately escapes the author. It might be worth it to take this book on if you have a university paper to write. It will certainly scintillate your professor being of the same vocabulary and possibly biases. But if you are looking to expanding your understanding of the Inka or Andean cultures from a spiritual or mythic perspective then look elsewhere. Get yourself to South America, Peru, spend time with the shamans. Then you can learn what myth is really about. And how it lives today.
See all 20 customer reviews...
The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan PDF
The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan EPub
The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan Doc
The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan iBooks
The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan rtf
The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan Mobipocket
The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan Kindle
^ Download PDF The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan Doc
^ Download PDF The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan Doc
^ Download PDF The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan Doc
^ Download PDF The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, by William Sullivan Doc
